Hammer Films to Develop and Produce Ian Fried’s Gaslight

Talk about timing! Just last night I jokingly accused someone of trying to “Gaslight” me, and now comes word of a new project coming our way from Hammer Films with the same title. Read on for details!

From the Press Release:Simon Oakes, Vice-Chairman of Exclusive Media and President & CEO of Hammer, and Guy East and Nigel Sinclair, Co-Chairmen of Exclusive Media, have announced that iconic production company Hammer Films, an Exclusive Media company, has acquired the rights to GASLIGHT, an original screenplay written by newcomer Ian Fried. Hammer will develop and produce GASLIGHT for the big screen.

The screenplay landed on Hollywood’s Black List of the best unproduced scripts in 2011 and is an atmospheric thriller in the vein of From Hell meets The Silence of the Lambs. Secretly imprisoned in a London insane asylum, the infamous Jack the Ripper helps Scotland Yard investigators solve a series of grisly murders whose victims all share the iconic death brand: dual puncture wounds to the neck.

Tobin Armbrust, President of Worldwide Production & Acquisitions of Exclusive Media, Hammer’s parent company, will oversee the project for Hammer. He commented, “Ian’s script is an atmospheric thriller that reads like a Gothic Silence of the Lambs. He does a fantastic job of weaving iconic characters into a plausible and entertaining story.”

Fried is currently writing an original supernatural action project called Spectral for Legendary Pictures. His previous script, The Ever After Murders, featuring fairy tale characters investigating murder scenes, also landed on Hollywood’s Black List in 2010.